Report of the Case of John W. Webster...Indicted for the Murder of George Parkman...Before the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts; including the Hearing on the Petition for a Writ of Error, the Prisoner's Confessional Statements and Application for a Commutation of Sentence
Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1850.
First Edition. Hardcover. very good-. Xii, 628 pp, with index, illustrations, plans. Three-quarter brown leather, marbled boards. Some edgewear and foxing, dampstaining to first 10 pp, repair to frontispiece and title page; all else very good and sound. A full account of this sensational case, in which a Harvard professor was accused, and ultimately convicted, of murdering a prominent Boston physician and dismembering and burning the body in his laboratory furnace. Oliver Wendell Holmes worked from an office directly above Webster’s and testified at the trial. The most important testimony, however, pertained to the medical and dental evidence used to positively identify Parkman’s remains. This was the first time that forensic evidence of this kind was used in an American criminal trial. The case was widely covered in the press, but McDade (1060) notes that this volume “is the basic book on the case and contains all the evidence.”.
Item #13986
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